Gear Master
by ammcj062
Summary: Steampunk AU. "Steven doesn't like going down to Antony's workshop. A perpetual cloud of smoke and steam swirls around Antony's workbench, infusing every corner of the room with the strange exhaust of metal tang and wet wood." More of an atmospheric piece than plotty.


Steven doesn't like going down to Antony's workshop. A perpetual cloud of smoke and steam swirls around Antony's workbench, infusing every corner of the room with the strange exhaust of metal tang and wet wood. The lights from his strange contraptions eerily reflect through the cloud, filling the shop with beams of illuminated dust and tiny specks of metal shavings. The beams reflect off every brass-polished surface until the entire place is criss-crossed with floating debris of a hundred different inventions, all churning away with the clunk and thuds that Steven has learned to associate with this age.

In the middle of it all, Antony sits at his workbench. Some days he is hard at work, smithing and shaving and shaping complex networks of gears and steam that never look like they should be able to complete their intended function. Yet Steven watches these bits of metal, cobbled together in the hands of a genius, become something more than the sum of their parts, become something almost magical in its defiance of all sense and reason.

Steven has begun to measure how strange and impossible the current project is by Antony's state of undress. For simpler Stark Industry patents, he merely takes off his suit jacket and appears as elegant as Steven has seen him at any of the formal affairs the Avengers attend. The more complicated ones, or hardware for contracts that have nearly gone past their due, is displayed through rolled up shirt sleeves. When it's invention for personal entertainment, the vest comes off; when it's new ideas for Avenger hardware or inventions to keep Director Fury appeased, the suspenders disappear.

The truly visionary work occurs when Antony Stark, suave captain of industry, disappears, stripped down to his bare bones in a grease-stained undershirt and yesterday's pants. That is when he works on the Iron Man suit, or on the pieces of strange technology plucked from Hydra weapons and alien invaders and countless other enemies. That is when he fabricates entirely new methods of communication and vision (though Director Fury refuses to test out the implant) and everything else Steven had always assumed would never be the realm of machines. On those days Steven can catch a glimpse of the brass key hanging just under the neckline of Antony's undershirt and imagines he can hear the soft whirr-click of Antony's mechanical chestplate. On those days Steven looks for the sinuous raised lump of a device he's never laid eyes on, one that curls around the sides of Antony's ribs and leaves a raised circle in the center of his chest just over his heart.

He wonders if Antony is completely human any more, or if he merely has this ability with machines because he is half one himself.

Other days, quiet days when the rattle of his hammer doesn't echo through the mansion, Steven will peer into the recesses of the workshop's fog to see Antony muttering away to himself and scrawling on rolls of parchment – reams of the stuff, enough to make Steven cringe and remember the days when good parchment was a rare luxury and most schooling was done on hard-used slates. Then Antony will have an idea or a flight of fancy and he will lunge up and pull on one of a series of ropes woven above his head. The clanking and thumping will increase; the gears in the ceiling and other hidden places will turn, and the sheet of parchment will roll away, replaced by another. Sometimes Antony will declare it utter garbage before lunging up, and will give the rope a second, stronger heave.

Steven wonders where those drafts end up, wonders if all that parchment is destroyed or merely put away for a later perusal. He longs to gather up every discarded scrap and weave them together, build a representation of Antony from the discards of his mad creations. Perhaps these discarded children will provide some explanation to the workings of their maker's mind.

The other Avengers are easy to comprehend. Agent Barton and Miss Romanova, despite being a woman, are soldiers, loyal and steadfast whatever century they come from. Thor is a pagan god, driven by honor and archaic rules Steven doesn't understand but is willing to accommodate. Doctor Banner is a good man trying to make the best out of monstrous situation. Antony, though – Antony is a millionaire, a dilettante, the odd man out. He has never followed orders or acted in what he saw to be error. He isn't a relic like Steven, living out his displaced days in the closest he can get to familiarity. Steven knows the story, knows the about the kidnapping and subsequent ransom. What he doesn't understand is how a man like Antony, by all accounts self-interested and entirely civilian, finds motivation in such a situation to throw himself into even more danger.

Steven doesn't like going down to Antony's workshop. He goes anyway, braves the smoke and the smells and the danger of burnt appendages because he longs to unshroud the mystery hidden behind this age's cloud of perpetual steam and smoke. He wants to know what birthed the Iron Man, what forged the spirit that takes up the armor and fights against gods and monsters for a cause he has no more motivation to risk life and limb for than everyone Steven has ushered out of the line of fire. He peers through the motes drifting through the air, hoping to one day discover what it is that makes the gear master tick.


End file.
